Results

Assessment Ecologies

This figure is from Asao Inoue's book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. These interrelated elements have been adapted to UAF's General Education Assessment model to showcase the non-linear interaction and relationships that are set in motion as we come together to participate in the ecology. Open source book available here.

An ecological approach to learning assessment means that we focus holistically and relationally. We can design a healthy ecosystem together by recognizing how feedback from our system can be used to not only improve and strengthen but also to grow the quality of the connections between contexts, both institutional and community based.

People

  • Our students, faculty, administrators, and staff!

  • General Education Faculty engagement begins when the Dean of General Studies reaffirms the shared commitment to quality assessment for learning, reestablishing the importance of a strong General Education foundation.

Products

  • Accessible, timely, actionable reports!

  • Course-embedded, authentic student responses that are randomly sampled to then be analyzed with a locally-designed rubric which has been aligned to a particular learning outcome & applied by a calibrated diverse, interdisciplinary faculty team drives our published results.

Places

  • We are always located on ancestral home lands.

  • We focus on one Learning Outcome a year. In the fifth year, we revisit the results in an institution-wide General Education summit. Our first summit will be in 2025.

Parts

  • Faculty Senate Learning Outcomes; Local, Aligned Rubrics; Tailored, Course-embedded Assignments;

  • These parts are collaboratively developed and redesigned and revised after a four-year cycle. Our current focus is on the home page of this website.



Purposes

  • Accountability; Relevance; Improvement; Collaboration

  • Highlight the 2020-2021 purpose.

Processes

  • Routine; Automated; Experiential

  • An example for what the general assignment submission form looks like is here.

Power

  • Faculty Senate policies limit and make possible our action.

  • Signature Assignments are incentivized through a complete/incomplete participation system. Faculty must acknowledge timely work but not rank the qualities of an answer as a means of a course grade.